


The Garden

by Eatgreass



Series: Statement fics [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), oh this one doesnt have other trigger warnings like my last couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25147468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatgreass/pseuds/Eatgreass
Summary: Statement of Steven Douglas, regarding his experience with a strange garden.
Series: Statement fics [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1814887
Kudos: 3





	The Garden

I don’t believe in ghosts, and personally I think the whole concept of an afterlife is stupid. Before coming here, I didn’t believe in your whole crackpot institute. I think I believe now. In the supernatural, I mean. I still don’t believe that there’s anything after this life but a dull nothingness. If anything, my experience proved that.

  
I’ve started seeing a new therapist recently, since my old one… well, she wasn’t great, said some shit that made me realize I had to find someone else if I wanted to improve my mental health. So there I was, on my way to my new therapist, one that hopefully wouldn’t tell me what my gender was, or give me advice that blew up in my face each time I tried it. Well, I knew those streets like the back of my hand, and probably better. But that day, there was a new building. But even stranger than that, this new building was covered in an intricate mural that I was certain I had never seen before.

  
Orange and yellow flowers coated every surface of the building, stylized, but strangely three dimensional as well. The vines curved around the building, winding and intertwining with each other, as if they were unwilling to let go. In fact, the only part of the building that wasn’t covered in these strange, interlocking flowers was a pitch black door. It was the kind of black that leached out into the flowers, rotting them, and creeping out into the air.

  
I did the stupidest thing a person could do then. I know, I know, I’m the cliche white enby in the horror movie that dies first. But I couldn’t help what I did then, I felt forced to reach out to the door and watch as it slowly creaked open. I heard whimpers from inside, and I tried to walk away, I really did. But you have to understand, I wasn’t controlling my own body at that point. I wasn’t the one in control, and so I walked into the room of flowers. That’s what it was, and I thought it would be more sinister, but no, the yellow-orange flowers on the outside of the building mirrored the yellow-orange flowers on the inside. Despite the beauty and innocence of the flowers, I somehow knew that I was not to touch any of them. As my eyes adjusted to the brightness of the garden inside of the warehouse, I saw that the building was much larger on the inside than was strictly possible. The golden flowers in the row in front of me were not the only ones in the garden. Behind them there were roses, more exquisite than any I had seen, and haunting blue lilies, beyond them, looking almost as if they were ghosts. Purple pansies, glowing in the darkness behind the roses, and pink zinnias, that looked as if they were smiling at me.

  
I wanted to touch them. I really did, a yearning in my bones stronger than anything I had felt before. But somehow, I knew that if I was to touch the flowers in front of me, I would never leave the endless garden. Although I could not stop myself from approaching the flowers, I was able to pull my hand back before I touched the delicate carnations and took upon myself whatever curse they had been given.

  
Despite staring at the beautiful lilies, roses, and chrysanthemums, there was an awful feeling of wrongness to it. They were not my flowers. This was not my home. And so I did what any sane person would have done from the minute they saw an odd building covered in graffiti that had definitely not been there before. I turned tail and ran. I was finally strong enough to pull myself away from the mesmerizing flowers, and so I did. Not that stupid, after all. That was the end of that, I thought. I tried to forget about it for weeks, and I was nearly able to, but I know now that those plants did not want me to forget.

  
Right when I had nearly convinced myself that it was a dream-- right when I had finally been able to tell myself that all I had seen was somebody's flower garden that I stumbled into on a whim inside an abandoned building, it happened.

  
It is very hard to explain. The building came back. Right across the street from my flat, I could see that it had not been there before. This time, I was able to resist the pull of going into that wretched building. This time, I didn’t want to.

  
After careful deliberation, I left to look inside the building again. There I stood in front of it for nearly three hours. The flowers seemed to change and shift in a mesmerizing pattern, and they seemed to be looking at me. Some with faces of terror, some with barely contained rage, and others still with a sense of melancholy resignation.

  
I wanted to go inside the building. I wanted that more than I have wanted anything in my life, and I was absolutely certain that it was my own want, not the desire of any other creature that was willing me inside that place. So I walked in.

  
As soon as I stepped foot inside the threshold of the warehouse, I knew it was different. Before I even looked up to see the garden, I could smell them. I don’t know how to describe the scent, save for the fact that it smelled of death. It smelled of dead animals and dead plants alike. The scent was that of sickly sweet decomposition, and the scent of rot in all the same breath. It was an overpowering smell that made me cover my mouth and nose and make me gag.

  
Then I looked up, and my horror was one that I had never felt before, and I have never felt after, and I am certain that I will never feel again. The beautiful flowers I had seen previously, the oranges, the reds, the blues, they were gone. Replaced by a stinking mush of dead flowers. All was brownish and wilting, a horrible contrast to the colors I had seen previously. Everything was so awfully, horribly, dead. I walked through the garden, touching every single flower this time, knowing that the death these plants had held had rotted them from the inside out, and that they could no longer hurt me. As I walked past where each stunning flower arrangement had been, I whispered solace and prayers to each of the dying and dead flowers. It seemed important, somehow. There was not a soul in the garden, and I was sure that I had been there for hours, immune to the fatigue I should have felt, but it was imperative that I put the wilted flowers to rest. There was a door at the back of the warehouse. It was painted pure black, with only one orange flower on it, in lieu of where a peephole usually is. I opened it, and left the garden, walking into the darkness of the night.

  
I have not seen the garden since then. I have not even felt the presence of it, a presence that I had not noticed when it was watching me. I know that the garden is dead, and it will never return, but I keep waiting. I have to wait, even though it will not come back, some horrible part of me believes that it can.  
It can’t.

  
But there is one thing that I need you to know, I need you to believe, as it is the most important part of the encounter I had. The flowers, before they rotted away, did not want to hurt me. I said before that touching them would have imparted their curse unto me, but I maintain that they did not want to hurt me, despite the fact that they would have. It was simply their nature, that any mortal that touched them would have died. They were not malicious. Just because something can hurt you, will hurt you, does not mean that it wants to. These flowers were innocent. They lived, and they died, and they knew what they could do. They were not ashamed of their nature, but they were not prideful of it, either.

  
I still see the garden in my dreams. I want to find it again, I have searched for it again. I know that I will not find it, because it does not exist anymore. Some things are not meant to last.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr is @eatgreass if you wanna say hi


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